Research

A Management Decision

The night before the space shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986, a three-way teleconference was held between Morton-Thiokol, Incorporated (MTI) in Utah; the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, AL; and the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. This teleconference was organized at the last minute to address temperature concerns raised by MTI engineers who had learned that overnight temperatures for January 27 were forecast to drop into the low 20s and potentially upper teens, and they had nearly a decade of data and documentation showing that the shuttle’s O-rings performed increasingly poorly the lower the temperature dropped below 60-70 degrees. The forecast high for January 28 was in the low-to-mid-30s; space shuttle program specifications stated unequivocally that the solid rocket boosters – the two white stereotypical rocket-looking devices on either side of the orbiter itself, and the equipment for which MTI was the sole-source contractor – should never be operated below 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Every moment of this teleconference is crucial, but here I’ll focus on one detail in particular. Launch go / no-go votes had to be unanimous (i.e., not just a majority). MTI’s original vote can be summarized thusly: “Based on the presentation our engineers just gave, MTI recommends not launching.” MSFC personnel, however, rejected and pushed back strenuously against this recommendation, and MTI managers caved, going into an offline-caucus to “reevaluate the data.” During this caucus, the MTI general manager, Jerry Mason, told VP of Engineering Robert Lund, “Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.” And Lund instantly changed his vote from “no-go” to “go.”

This vote change is incredibly significant. On the MTI side of the teleconference, there were four managers and four engineers present. All eight of these men initially voted against the launch; after MSFC’s pressure, all four engineers were still against launching, and all four managers voted “go,” but they ALSO excluded the engineers from this final vote, because — as Jerry Mason said in front of then-President Reagan’s investigative Rogers Commission in spring 1986 — “We knew they didn’t want to launch. We had listened to their reasons and emotion, but in the end we had to make a management decision.”

A management decision.

Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, Commander Michael John Smith, Pilot Ellison S. Onizuka, Mission Specialist One Judith A

Before the launch of the new Cadillac Blackwing sedans with manual standard, Cadillac has released internal researching on the popularity of manual transmissions in the US. The Harris Poll was commissioned to do this research.

Essentially Cadillac's product planners had to figure out if a case could be made for releasing the upcoming Blackwing cars in manual, and commissioned this research to figure it out.

The original slide deck can be found here: Manual Transmission Study 30Oct2020 - Google Slides

Highlights:

• 55% of American drivers have owned a manual transmission vehicle before
• 66% know how to drive a manual
• 42% aren't interested in manual transmissions vehicles at all
• higher income and higher education Americans are more likely to know how to drive a manual and are more interested

TLDR; There are likely 150-300% MORE GME shares currently circulating than ever issued. This is likely the result of abusive naked short selling practices.

SEC, I know you're here. Do your fucking job. Don't let the American people get fucked by Wall Street once again.

Hello my fellow autists,

This is going to be a follow up to my post last Tuesday on my suspicions of Melvin and friends illegally covering short positions. https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/lalucf/i_suspect_the_hedgies_are_illegally_covering/

I've channeled peak autism through a combination of alcohol and Adderall over the past couple days to read *literally* thousands of pages of SEC/FINRA documents, news reports, and op-eds on abusive naked short selling.

Naked short selling has been discussed much in the past few days so I won't dig deep into it here (check my other posts), but one of the side effects of it are failed to delivered (FTD) shares. This also has been discussed in detail the past few days, but an important part of the equation has been missing when discussing FTD's thus far.

When a short seller fails to deliver, the DTC essentially generates an IOU for the broker of the individual buying the share(s). This IOU is called a failed to receive (FTR). To the buyer themselves, this FTR would show up in their account and be able to be traded as if they actually had a real share. And here's the kicker, a broker has no obligation to tell that you received a FTR share, i.e. a fake share.

Working from this I wanted to estimate roughly how many total GME shares could be in circulation.

From the Gamestop investor relations website I was able to pull the number of all shares owned by insiders and institutions.

This number comes out to 72,453,478 shares.

Now, the retail investor side is extremely difficult to find out.

What I did to provide a reasonable estimation is write a python script that randomly sampled comments on the /r/wsb subreddit looking for expressions like "Holding XX Shares" or "100 @ 60".

I scoped this down to only GME related posts within the past 24 hours.

From the ~1000 comments I sampled, the average shares held was 126. The max was 6000 (/u/CrazyFrenchLadies you fucking legend). If we assume an extremely conservative percent of /r/wsb subscribers is still holding, say 3.5% (~300,000 apes), that would mean just among us we hold 37,800,000 shares.

Let's recap that - insiders / institutions hold 72,453,478 share

Open Science (a movement to make all phases of scientific research transparent and accessible to the public) has made great strides in the past decade, but those come with new ethical concerns that the COVID-19 Pandemic has highlighted. Open science promotes transparency in data and analysis and has been demonstrated to improve the quality and quantity of scientific research in participating institutions. These principles are never more valuable than in the midst of a global crisis such as the COVID pandemic, where quality information is needed so researchers can quickly and effectively build upon one another's work. It is also vital for the public and decision makers who need to make important calls about public health. However, misinformation can have a serious material cost in human lives that grows exponentially if not addressed properly. Preprints, lack of data sharing, and rushed peer review have led to confusion for both experts and the lay public alike.

We are a global collaboration that has looked at COVID19 research and potential misuses of basic transparency research principles. Our findings are available as a preprint and all our data is available online. To sum up, our findings are that:

• Preprints (non peer-reviewed manuscripts) on COVID19 have been mentioned in the news approximately 10 times more than preprints on other topics published during the same period.

• Approximately 700 articles have been accepted for publication in less than 24 hours, among which 224 were detailing new research results. Out of these 224 papers, 31% had editorial conflicts of interest (i.e., the authors of the papers were also part of the editorial team of the journal).

• There has been a large amount of duplicated research projects probably leading to potential scientific waste.

• There have been numerous methodologically flawed studies which could have been avoided if research protocols were transparently shared and reviewed before the start of a clinical trial.

• Finally, the lack of data sharing and code sharing led to the now famous The Lancet scandal on Surgisphere

We hope that we can all shed some light on our findings and answer your questions. So there you go, ask us anything. We are looking forward to discussing these issues

Hi Reddit! Dr. Sarah Berry, Prof. Tim Spector, Prof. Nicola Segata, Dr. Francesco Asnicar, Prof. Christopher Gardner here!

As part of PREDICT, the world’s largest in-depth study of diet and nutrition, we’ve uncovered a panel of bacteria that are closely positively or negatively tied to metabolic health and weight, as well as the foods that help them thrive.

These exciting new findings, published this week in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine, form the basis of our at-home test and ZOE gut health insights.

During this AMA we’re happy to answer all your questions about the gut microbiome and its link to your overall health, disease, food choices and the latest diet trends.

Please read our bios below for more information on our areas of expertise. We'll be here at 9AM EST and we will aim to answer any follow up questions over the next couple of days.

Dr. Sarah Berry is a researcher and reader in nutritional science at King's College London. Her research interests relate to the influence of dietary components on markers of cardiovascular disease risk, with a particular focus on the influence of food and fat structure on postprandial metabolism. [https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/sarah-berry]

Tim Spector MD is Professor of Genetic Epidemiology, King’s College London, honorary physician at Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital, the PI of the Covid Symptom Study app and scientific co-founder of health science company ZOE. He is a specialist in twin studies, genetics, epigenetics, and microbiome and diet. Spector's latest book, Spoon-Fed, is groundbreaking in that forces us to question every diet plan, official recommendation, miracle cure or food label we encounter, and encourages us to rethink our whole relationship with food. [https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/professor-tim-spector]

Dr. Nicola Segata is an associate professor and principal investigator. His background is in metagenomics, machine learning, microbiome research, and microbial genomics. He started and is leading the Laboratory of Computational Metagenomics at the Centre for Integrative Biology (University of Trento). http://segatalab.cibio.unitn.it/people.html

Dr. Francesco Ascnicar's major research interests are the developing of computational tools for metagenomic and phylogenetic analyses.

UPDATE 4:30PM EST: Thank you all for making our first r/IAmA so enjoyable! We appreciated your questions so much that we've been glued to our screens all day trying answer everyone. We're going to sign off for

How does a company not know that the fucking presidential inauguration is happening? Putting that aside, the stream does eventually go live aaaaand... it's just some guy ranting? Was it recorded on his phone?

Is Citron an actual thing? Is there a brick and mortar office building, with revenues and services, or is it literally just some guy making tweets with a lemon picture? I'm so confused right now.

And why aren't they bullish on $LMND? What's the point of manipulating the market if you aren't going to make memes or inside jokes? Gourd, what a waste.